‘Michael King offered us a lift back to Earth on his damn kernel-driven hulk ship, but I’d rather walk back.

‘Look – in some ways the most dangerous part of the whole journey, the launch, all that microwave energy concentrated on your delicate structure, is already over. Your chances of coming to harm during the cruise are minimal. But in other ways the challenge of the mission has only just begun, by which I mean the human challenge.

‘You know that they ran longevity experiments during the Heroic Generation age. Some of the resulting struldbrugs are still alive, even now, in the UN camps. Despite that, we humans still aren’t too good at running projects that require a long attention span. So we have to find ways to look after you, Angelia, over your decade-long cruise, and the years of exploration that will follow. I’ve done my best to establish a long-term institution here. I’ve tried to lock in the support staff with contracts and bonus structures, though I have my doubts how well that will work out. But I will be here, as long as I am able; and after me, I hope, Stef. Your half-sister, you called her! I like that.

‘And, listen to me. Now we have proved that this mission mode is feasible, now we have successfully launched you, I’m looking for funding to send more emissaries after you. After all, the infrastructure is here now, the power station, the lens. The solar power is free, and the incremental cost of manufacturing another you is tiny. It seems crazy not to use all this again. Enjoy Proxima, my dear. You won’t be alone out there for long, I promise.

‘Be patient with us mere mortals, Angelia, out there among the stars. And sleep tight.’

CHAPTER 15

2170

Six months in from their stranding, or twenty-two Per Ardua years later, depending which way you looked at it, the colonists decided to mount an expedition to the northern forest belt.

Four of them, Yuri, Onizuka, Lemmy and Martha, got themselves ready one morning, with packs on their backs and bottles of filtered water, and their crossbows, the only substantial weapons the shuttle crew had left them. They checked out the sky before leaving. They were learning how to read Proxima’s complex face for flare weather, as they called it. They figured they would be safe out in the open for a few hours.

It was around six kilometres to the forest. They set off along a trail they had already been stamping out: a Forest Road that led off at right angles to the Shuttle Trail, the tremendous straight-line scrape the craft had left running from east to west. They came this way regularly to collect saplings from the forest edge for firewood, but today they were planning to go further. The land rose, gradually, as they headed north, leaving the lake behind. The ColU speculated that there was some kind of big geological event going on up here, a slow uplift across a whole province. Maybe. Sometimes Yuri thought he could smell sulphur, sourness.

The weather was overcast, muggy, humid. For such a static world the weather had turned out to be surprisingly changeable, with systems of low or high pressure bubbling up endlessly from the south. It was warm in this unending season, always like a humid summer’s day in North Britain, from what Yuri remembered of the weather. But the ColU, ever curious in its methodical robot way, said it had seen traces of cold: frost-shattered rock, gravel beds, even glaciated valleys in the flanks of features like the Cowpat. Evidence that glaciers had come this way in the past, if not whole ice ages. Somehow this world could deliver up a winter.

Despite the rise, the walk was easy enough. The years of full gravity on the Ad Astra had hardened up Yuri’s Mars-softened muscles. On Per Ardua the gravity was actually a shade less than Earth’s, according to the ColU, who patiently measured such things. The planet’s radius was a tenth less than Earth’s – Per Ardua was smaller than Venus – but its density was a good bit higher than Earth’s. The ColU speculated that its iron core was more massive, relatively, its mantle of lighter minerals and rocky crust thinner. Nobody listened; nobody cared.

Yuri thought that patterns of behaviour were emerging. For instance, they’d trekked up this way for firewood before, they’d used the forest, but they’d never explored it. After six months they still knew barely anything about this world on which they were, it seemed, doomed to spend the rest of their lives. Nothing beyond what they could see within the prison of their horizon, and the glimpses they’d had from the shuttle’s windows on the way down, glimpses Lemmy was painstakingly assembling into a map of the substellar side of this one-face world. Nobody cared.

There was no common spirit. The colony, camp, whatever, was still pretty much a shambles, as it had been from when the astronauts had lifted off, taking the discipline they had briefly imposed with them. Bundles of gear, clothing, food, tools, other stuff, lay around in the dirt where they had been dumped out of the shuttle. Everybody still lived in tents. Even the colony’s two graves, of Joseph Mullane and Jenny Amsler, were left untended.

Then there was the unending daylight, the changelessness. Lemmy said that humans were evolved from tropical apes. Two million years of adaptation protested against the lack of day and night, and regular sleep was hard to come by. The ColU said that their sleep cycles were staying in synch with each other, roughly, but were gradually lengthening, away from the Earth norm. Nobody seemed to care about that, either.

Nobody even listened to the ColU – not even Yuri, even though the ColU seemed to think he was more amenable than the rest, and would try to engage him in conversation, such as about the astronomical sightings Yuri kept up sporadically with his bits of equipment, and that the ColU supplemented with its own observations, made with its own sensor pods. All this was a distraction for Yuri, a hobby, something to do to keep him sane. The ColU’s attentions, attracting the mockery of the rest, just embarrassed him.

And every so often some threat or other, a storm, a bad flare, a threatened flood from their tame lake, would bring everybody down even more.

Under it all, of course, was the brute reality of their stranding, a rejection many of them would clearly be struggling to accept whatever world they were living on. They drove each other crazy, these strangers forced to become lifelong neighbours, with no hope of escape.

The ColU was the exception. It quietly got on with its tasks, slowly processing huge rectangular areas of Arduan dirt into terrestrial soil, and sampling the water and the local life, the stem creatures and the lichen and the stromatolites and the bugs. It enthused about bugs it dug out of the ground, as deep as it drilled; on Per Ardua as on Earth, it said, life suffused the deep rocks – there was probably far more biomass down there than on the surface – with complex life just a kind of flourish, a grace note in a symphony of bacterial life.

Its quiet efficiency, its air of plastic cheerfulness, only irritated people even more, it seemed to Yuri.

Anyhow, from this squalid little community of reluctant draftees, no leader had yet emerged. Yuri wasn’t even sure who had decided on taking this walk.

In the early days, Onizuka and John Synge and Harry Thorne had all acted like they were the big men. But Martha Pearson, who had once run a substantial business back on Earth, and Abbey Brandenstein, an ex-cop and proven killer, were pretty strong characters too.

Mardina Jones had never tried to play the leader, probably wisely. Always a little outside the group, the Lieutenant was a target for insults and mockery as much as sympathy. But Yuri watched her just soak it all up, and get on with her self-appointed tasks. She no longer wore her crew uniform. In fact she seemed to have shed her astronaut persona, her whole ISF career. She had gone from a kind of motherly prison guard into a taciturn survivor, in the blink of an eye. Maybe she was reverting to something deeper, older, a core of her life that had been hidden under the layers above.